Delhi Based GetMyParking Is Wielding Technology To Solve An Everyday Problem

Many countries, including the United States and certainly India, suffer from chaos associated due to car parking issues. While street parking is free, but there are no vacant spaces, many people drive around hunting for a space. This wastes valuable time and fuel. It interferes with pedestrians, congests roads and pollutes the air. Finding a space to park in the city is becoming difficult as the number of vehicles is increasing. The total sales in the Domestic Vehicle sector from April 2015 – March 2016 is expected to be at 20.47Mn units.

With the rise in population the number of personal vehicle is also on a rise. Earlier one car or a scooter was sufficient for a family – hence the popular hamara bajaj jingle of the nineties advertising the two-wheeler brand. Now if a family has four members, it’s not uncommon to see all four having a vehicle of each, and sometimes even more. Ideally, the parking space should also increase, but unfortunately the real situation is far from it. Like living space, parking space is facing a severe crunch.

Delhi-based Agile Parking Solutions, GetMyParking, an app that provides real time parking information near your destination seems to be the one stop solution to ease the combustion.

Founded in, July 2015 by Chirag Jain and Rasik Pansare, who are an alumnus of IIT Madras and FMS Delhi respectively, came to realize that traffic and parking spaces were the unorganized sector. Viewing this as an opportunity, the duo developed a cloud based mobile technology which comes real handy to its users.

Get My Parking works on some simple fundamentals and enables its users to search, book and navigate parking, saving them from circling around the parking yard to find a space where they can lock their vehicles. The user gets a bird’s eye view of all the legal parking lots with map of locations, availability, pricing and other details and gets assured parking with cashless payment and navigation.

“People are buying more vehicles today than ever before. The exponential rise in demand for parking space is crippling the urban infrastructure and causing needless congestion. We believe only technology and data-driven solutions can solve this chronic problem with the efficient use of existing parking space”, said Mr. Chirag Jain, co-founder GetMyParking.

GetMyParking found a smartphone based solution with a Bluetooth printer.These smartphones are placed at the entry and exit of the parking area that can total the number of vehicles. Essentially it’s a POS (Point of Sale) system which is deployed in the field.

They sold this ticketing machine to the contractors that was designed in such a way that could keep the actual count of cars parked at a place. This in turn helped the contractor’s reducing the revenue bridge.

Traction So Far

So far the company has 200 installations with 30,000 transactions happening on a daily basis and they hope to increase it to 3 lakh transactions a day with over 500 installations. Added to this, the has been the official partners for the Delhi Dare Devils team in Delhi for their matches and had also managed the entire parking space for the Maha-kumbh mela that happened in Ujjain. Having parked 2.6 Mn cars in the last 10 months, Getmyparking is committed to digitise the parking industry on a large scale, and thereby solving a major everyday problem.

The company is more focused on the supply of parking spaces and gradually becoming a consumer centric platform. They have a team of 30 people working on the parking space and they plan to establish themselves across all the smart cities. ‘There is a huge market of parking industry, globally, which is estimated at INR 10,000 crores’, said Chirag Jain.

Get My Parking secured Rs 2.5 crore funding from Chennai Angels. Sudhir Rao of IndusAge Partners led the investment from The Chennai Angels.

GetMyParking aims at capturing the entire parking ecosystem. They plan move into partnership with various organizations across the smart cities that offer a market of INR 20000 crore in the next 5 years and by tying up with municipalities and city administrations.

Their revenue generation stands at the B2B solutions offered by them to the contractors and through managing the parking spaces at various events. They’ve acquired 85 B2B clients and their target is to step in the residential and corporate parking sphere. They’ve partnered with two companies in Netherlands and Canada that serve as a revenue generation for the company.

There are other players in this sector such as Pparke, Constapark, Foospot in India, and on the global front, Luxe Valet, Zirx,Pakwheels and Valet Anywhere.

Editor’s Note

In Delhi, there are approximately 2.7 million cars on the road with an hourly addition of 20. Out of these, there are only 57,166 legal parking spaces with municipalities within the city. People spend 20 minutes on an average to find a parking spot wasting 0.3 litres of fuel, a research by Hindustan Times.

In times of dire need, GetMyParking may prove to be the desired solution though the story is yet to unfold.

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